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The debate would be more useful for all involved if it were re-framed in terms of asking what problems TDD is well-suited to, rather than arguing over whether i
by silentbicycle 17y ago
The debate would be more useful for all involved if it were re-framed in terms of asking what problems TDD is well-suited to, rather than arguing over whether it's (implicitly, always) a net win or not. (This is also true for many other techniques, I think.)
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoAnother similar, and superficially easy, improvement in the level of conversation would be if, instead of claiming X "sucks" or "rocks" in absolute terms, people ranked things against other known items. For example, if you think unit testing is generally good but TDD is a bad idea then give some context to that: is TDD worse than no unit tests at all? Is it worse than low unit test coverage say 20, 30, 40%? Or off at a tangent TDD makes Java programming feel like Ruby (or vice versa), just something for people to intellectually grab onto in terms of scale. I ask because not unit testing at all seems (to me) to be further from unit testing than TDD is, yet from this current discussion it would appear that unit test fans have more issues with the latter than the former.
- billswift 17y agoIt would also be useful if people would be more explicit and specific about the techniques they are actually discussing. Consider, for example, the earlier comments about confusing or conflating TDD and unit testing.
- silentbicycle 17y agoPart of the reason the debate is muddled is that TDD forces one to use unit / regression testing. People promoting TDD often take credit for the benefits of those, when evaluating TDD alone concerns whether writing tests upfront as a design technique is actually better, provided tests are still written.